The IOSEA Bibliography Resource, launched in November 2009, aims to make available to interested practitioners essential information about marine turtle conservation and research, with an initial focus on the Western Indian Ocean region.
It has been developed especially to support the work of the Western Indian Ocean - Marine Turtle Task Force, a technical committee established under the CMS/IOSEA Marine Turtle MoU and the Nairobi Convention. The aim of this volunteer committee is to support nations in the Western Indian Ocean (namely Comoros, France, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Somalia, South Africa, United Kingdom, and United Republic of Tanzania) in their implementation of the provisions of the IOSEA Marine Turtle MoU.
A number of workshops organised in recent years have highlighted the paucity of current and readily available information on marine turtles in the region, in the form of published or grey literature. The effect is that discussions and outcomes have tended to be based on partial information, expert opinion or inference rather than quantitative information. The IOSEA Bibliography Resource aims to overcome this shortcoming by compiling the most comprehensive collection of reference material ever on marine turtles of the Western Indian Ocean.
When the Bibliography Resource is opened, the default display contains all of the records in the database, sorted by year, in descending order (i.e. the most recent publications are listed first). The application contains a powerful search routine that enables the user to easily locate publications of particular interest. All of the publications have keywords associated with them, which help to identify their specific content. Alternatively, users may choose instead to search for specific words/names in the Title, Author, Editor or Abstract fields. Search queries can be filtered in several ways, and more sophisticated queries can be constructed using ‘Boolean’ logic.
The basic bibliography is available for general public viewing, querying and printing. However, the actual collection of documents that have been converted to electronic format (PDF) may be consulted only by colleagues associated with the WIO-MTTF and other concerned individuals who have been granted exclusive password access to the system.
The strict conditions for non-commercial research and educational use of the IOSEA collection are described during the login process. Over time, it is envisaged that some of the documents in the collection will be made publicly available, to the extent that any applicable copyrights are respected. As a general rule, however, journal articles will not be made publicly available.
Upon launching the system, in November 2009, the Bibliography Resource had some 550 entries. Many dozens of additional references have already been identified and will be added to the database when time permits.
We would like to acknowledge the efforts of Ms. Karien Bezuidenhout, working under the supervision of Dr. Ronel Nel at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa, for this initial compilation; and we would like to thank the many individuals who have contributed documents. Having made a significant investment of its own resources in the development of the database application, the Secretariat hopes that it will be put to good use by turtle practitioners; and we welcome feedback and suggestions for further enhancements.
Click to enter the Bibliography Resource
|
print
